A Context-Aware Architecture for Realizing Business Process Adaptation Strategies Using Fuzzy Planning

Business competency emerges in flexibility and reliability of services that an enterprise provides. To reach that, executing business processes on a context-aware business process management suite which is equipped with monitoring, modeling and adaptation mechanisms and smart enough to react properly using adaptation strategies at runtime, are a major requisite. In this paper, a context-aware architecture is described to bring adaptation to common business process execution software. The architecture comes with the how-to-apply methodology and is established based on process standards like business process modeling notation (BPMN), business process execution language (BPEL), etc. It follows MAPE-K adaptation cycle in which the knowledge, specifically contextual information and their related semantic rules — as the input of adaptation unit — is modeled in our innovative context ontology, which is also extensible for domain-specific purposes. Furthermore, to support separation of concerns, we took apart event-driven adaptation requirements from process instances; these requirements are triggered based on ontology reasoning. Also, the architecture supports fuzzy-based planning and extensible adaptation realization mechanisms to face new or changing situations adequately. We characterized our work in comparison with related studies based on five key adaptation metrics and also evaluated it using an online learning management system case study.

Increasing Resilience of Production Systems by Integrated Design

The paper presents a framework for considering resilience as an integrated aspect in the design of manufacturing systems. The framework comprises methods for the assessment of resilience, supply chain and production planning, flexible execution and control as well as modular and skill-based methods for automation systems. A basic classification of risk categories and their impacts on manufacturing environments is given so that a concept of reconfigurable and robust production systems can be derived. Based on this, main characteristics and concepts of resilience are applied to manufacturing systems. As a lever of increased resilience on business and supply chain level, options for synchronized production planning are presented in a discrete event simulation. Furthermore, a concept to increase resilience on the level of business process execution is investigated, allowing manufacturing tasks to be rescheduled during runtime using a declarative approach to amend conventional business process models.

Toward the Formalization of Business Process Model and Notation

Due to its versatility and wide variety of constructs, BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) is today the leading standard notation for creating visual models of business or organizational processes. It is a rich and expressive graphical language specially designed to provide a notation that is easily understood by all members of a company. Sometimes, however, this large number of controls and action nodes available can become a weakness since a given semantics can be represented in many ways, causing some ambiguity and raising the question of bisimilarity between two models. Today, it is universally recognized that formal methods are useful for the specification, design and verification of almost all systems, and essential for the most critical ones. On the other hand, the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) is an executable language structured in blocks, supported by many execution platforms, making it possible to specify the actions in the business processes with Web services. Since BPMN and BPEL share almost the same level of abstraction, we present in this article a formalization of the BPMN language through a mapping to BPEL, aiming to remove its ambiguities, to solve the complex modeling and interaction problems and open the door to many formal analysis such as model checking. We first formalize the BPEL language using the K framework, we then map the BPMN language to this formalized version of BPEL. The K Framework is a rewriting/reachability based framework enabling language developers to formally define all programming languages. Once a language is formally specified in the K framework, the framework automatically outputs a range of formal verification tool sets, compilers, debuggers and other developer tools for it.

Verifiable Model Construction for Business Processes

Business process specified in Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), which integrates existing services to develop composite service for offering more complicated function, is error-prone. Verification and testing are necessary to ensure the correctness of business processes. SPIN, for which the input language is PROcess MEta-LAnguage (Promela), is one of the most popular tools for detecting software defects and can be used both in verification and testing. In this paper, an automatic approach is proposed to construct the verifiable model for BPEL-based business process with Promela language. Business process is translated to an intermediate two-level representation, in which eXtended Control Flow Graph (XCFG) describes the behavior of BPEL process in the first level and Web Service Description Models (WSDM) depict the interface information of composite service and partner services in the second level. With XCFG of BPEL process, XCFGs for partner services are generated to describe their behavior. Promela model is constructed by defining data types based on WSDM and defining channels, variables and processes based on XCFGs. The constructed Promela model is closed, containing not only the BPEL process but also its execution environment. Case study shows that the proposed approach is effective.

Principles of information systems design for creation of thematic services based on integrated use of ground-aerospace data and modeling results

The paper describes an architecture and examples of information technologies and systems implementation for automating interdisciplinary projects accomplishment and creating thematic services that require utilizing Earth remote sensing data. It is proposed using approaches based on a service-oriented architecture, web services technologies, and technologies based on the Business Process Execution Language to organize the interaction of system components. Testing results show that the proposed approaches ensure achieving maximum automation of systems running, high reliability of the results, and user friendliness.

Secure Data Transmission in BPEL (Business Process Execution Language)

In the world of computation, the encryption is a technique by which the plaintext or any type of data which is converted from the readable form is transformed into an encoded form. That encoded form can only be read by another entity if they have corrected key for decryption. The proposed technique providing the security to the data in inefficient way that can be further use in implementation in new upcoming task and enhancement in current running projects of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) BPEL (Business Process Execution Language).

Validating Structural Metrics for BPEL Process Models

Business process models tend to get more and more complex with age, which hurts the ease with which designers can understand and modify them. Few metrics have been proposed to measure this complexity, and even fewer have been tested in the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) context. In this paper, we present three related experimental studies whose aim was to analyse the ability of four selected structural metrics to predict BPEL process model understandability and modifiability. We used Spearman’s rho and regression analysis in all three experiments. All metrics passed the correlation tests meaning that they can serve as understandability and modifiability indicators. Further, four of the metrics passed the regression test for understanding time implying that they can serve as understandability predictors. Finally, only one metric passed the regression test for modification time implying that it can serve as a modifiability predictor.